Michael Moore on Slacker Uprising’s Piracy ’Problem’
Category: News and Politics

Michael Moore on Slacker Uprising's Piracy 'Problem'

Like many other filmmakers, Moore wants his film to be seen by as many people as possible. However, the 'rights holders' have other interests. They want to sell the movie to as many people as possible, making sure they get every penny they are entitled to.

Moore's latest documentary, Slacker Uprising, is only available for free in Northern America. People who attempt to download the torrent elsewhere get this annoying "Sorry" message. Since there are no geographical restrictions on the official torrent file, however, it was easy to share the film with the rest of the world. It would only take one person to upload the torrent to another site, and the rest of the world would have access to it. That's exactly what happened.

In last week's article, we asked the question: "Is this deliberate, or accidental?" Since it is so easy to share the documentary with people outside the US and Canada, we hinted that this might have been done on purpose. A few days later, Michael Moore contacted us, with a direct response to the question we posed.

"What do you think I'm up to? I know it may not be obvious to most, but I think you guys get it," Moore wrote to us. "I only own the US and Canadian rights. So my hands are tied. But this is the 21st century. What are 'geographical rights' ?" Moore continued. "I'll say it for the hundredth time: If I buy a book and read it, and then give you the book to read, I have broken no laws. Why is that not true for all media?"

"I wish someone would figure out what I am up to," he concluded. We believe many people have by now. This isn't the first time Moore has clashed with the 'rights holders' of one of his own films. Last year The Weinstein Co. went after websites that hosted "Sicko", while Moore publicly said that it was ok for people to download his movie illegally. "I'm not a big believer in our copyright laws. I think they're way too restrictive," he said at the time.

Even further back, in 2004, Moore also backed the people who downloaded his documentary Fahrenheit 9/11. "The more people who see it the better, so I'm happy this is happening, he said. "Is it wrong for someone who's bought a film on DVD to let a friend watch it for free? Of course it's not. It never has been and never will be. I think information, art and ideas should be shared."

Perhaps it's time to do a documentary on the anti-piracy and pro-copyright lobby Mr. Moore? They might not kill our children in the US or overseas, but they do kill creativity, innovation, and the spread of knowledge. Worth looking into.

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MIT report debunks China energy myth
Category: News and Politics

MIT report debunks China energy myth

The problem isn't in the technology, it's the operations

David Chandler | MIT News Office | October 6, 2008

A detailed analysis of powerplants in China by MIT researchers debunks the widespread notion that outmoded energy technology or the utter absence of government regulation is to blame for that country's notorious air-pollution problems. The real issue, the study found, involves complicated interactions between new market forces, new commercial pressures and new types of governmental regulation.

China's power sector has been expanding at a rate roughly equivalent to three to four new coal-fired, 500 megawatt plants coming on line every week, said Edward S. Steinfeld, associate professor of political science at MIT.

After detailed survey and field research involving dozens of managers at 85 power plants across 14 Chinese provinces, Steinfeld and his co-authors, Richard Lester (professor, nuclear science and engineering and director of the MIT Industrial Performance Center) and Edward Cunningham (doctoral candidate, political science) found that in fact most of the new plants have been built to very high technical standards, using some of the most modern technologies available. The problem has to do with the way that energy infrastructure is being operated and the types of coals being burned.

New market pressures encourage plant managers to buy the cheapest, lowest quality and most-polluting coal available, while at the same time idle expensive-to-operate smokestack scrubbers or other cleanup technologies. The physical infrastructure is advanced, but the emissions performance ends up decidedly retrograde.

Understanding the realities of China's energy infrastructure and management is crucial, Steinfeld said, for gaining leverage over the whole gamut of global energy-related challenges. China's electric power sector is vast -- second only to America's in size -- and globally unparalleled in terms of the speed of its growth. "To a significant degree, our planet's energy and environmental future is now being written in China," he and his two co-authors wrote in a recent MIT Industrial Performance Center working paper (PDF available). Findings from the research have also recently been published in The China Economic Quarterly and an additional paper is currently under review at Energy Policy.

Steinfeld, who has been working in China since the late 1980s and has been carrying out this research project there since 2005, said that at present the Chinese government lacks reliable data on how the nation's powerplants are built and operated. Officially available data tend to be collected haphazardly and often by local authorities who have a vested interest in the outcomes. The survey work conducted by Steinfeld and his colleagues represents a first-of-its-kind effort by outsiders to collect unbiased, objective data of this sort at a national level.

One of the most surprising findings was that "the kinds of technology currently being adopted in China are not cheap. They're not buying junk, and in some cases the plants are employing state-of-the-art technology."

The findings suggest that emissions levels from Chinese powerplants, he said, "depend almost entirely on the quality of the coal they use. When they're hit by price spikes, they buy low-grade coal." Lower-grade coal, which produces high levels of sulfur emissions, can be obtained locally, whereas the highest-grade anthracite comes mostly from China's northwest and must travel long distances to the plants, adding greatly to its cost. Contrary to what many outsiders believe, the Chinese state has substantially improved its ability to implement and enforce rules on technology standards. It has been slower, however, to develop such abilities for monitoring the day-to-day operations of energy producers.

In some respects, the situation is more amenable to change than many people had assumed, Steinfeld said. With expanding regulatory capacity and increasingly sophisticated efforts to regulate through market-friendly pricing mechanisms, reformers could achieve change relatively quickly, he said. "At least the technology -- the physical infrastructure of China's energy system -- is not an impediment," he said. Indeed, it can ultimately prove a key asset for achieving better environmental outcomes.

Since coal quality is one important leverage point, "some new regulatory efforts probably need to be focused on the mines and coal markets," Steinfeld suggested. "That's the kind of question that this research begins to allow you to address."

The three co-authors of the study are members of the Industrial Performance Center's China Energy Group. The research was supported by Shell, the MIT Energy Initiative, and the MIT Sloan School of Management China Program.

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Fed Considers Plan to Buy Companies’ Unsecured Debt
Category: News and Politics

Fed Considers Plan to Buy Companies' Unsecured Debt

WASHINGTON — As pressure built in the credit markets and stocks spiraled lower around the world on Monday, the Federal Reserve was considering a radical new plan to jump-start the engine of the financial system.

Under a proposal being discussed with the Treasury Department, the Fed could buy vast amounts of the unsecured short-term debt that companies rely on to finance their day-to-day activities, according to officials familiar with the discussions. If this were to happen, the central bank would come closer than ever to lending directly to businesses.

While the move would put more taxpayer dollars at risk, it underscores the growing sense of urgency felt by policy makers in a climate where lending has virtually dried up.

The plan was being formulated amid cascading losses in global stock markets, as the banking crisis spread across Europe and investors feared dire consequences for the world economy. The Dow Jones industrial average fell as much as 800 points before a late recovery, finishing down 369.88, below 10,000 points for the first time since 2004.

Even before bankers on Wall Street reached their desks, European stocks were plunging. The Russian stock market dropped 19.1 percent, the biggest decline since the fall of the Soviet Union. Major indexes in London and Frankfurt lost more than 7 percent; stocks in Paris fell by 9 percent. Stocks in Latin America and other emerging economies took their worst collective tumble in a decade.

Volatility reached the highest level in two decades, and oil prices fell below $90 for the first time since February.

The contagion showed no signs of stopping when Asian markets opened Tuesday morning as the Nikkei index of Japanese stocks fell 3 percent and the Hang Seng index of stocks in Hong Kong fell 5 percent.

"There is a growing recognition that not only has the credit crunch refused to be contained, it continues to spread," said Ed Yardeni, an investment strategist. "It's gone truly global."

Investors are worried about what the evaporation of credit will do to an already-weakened global economy.

In the United States, consumers appear to be significantly curbing spending; last month, employers cut more jobs than any month in five years. The $6 decline in oil prices, which settled at $87.81 a barrel, stemmed in part from fears that demand will slacken in the face of a deteriorating economy.

The Fed plan is intended to renew the flow of credit on which the economy depends. Under its plan, the central bank would buy unsecured commercial paper, essentially short-term i.o.u.'s issued by banks, businesses and municipalities.

The market for that kind of debt has all but shut down in the last week, with many major corporations unable to borrow for longer than a day at a time, as banks become more fearful of giving out cash. The volume of such debt totaled about $1.6 trillion as of Oct. 1, down 11 percent from three weeks earlier.

These credit fears persisted over the weekend despite the $700 billion bailout package that Congress approved last week.

The cost of borrowing from banks and corporations remained high on Monday, increased in part by a series of high-profile bank bailouts in Europe, where governments scrambled to save several major lenders from collapse.

The United States government appears to be pressing ahead with other radical efforts to shore up the financial system, even wading into corners of the markets where it has rarely interfered.

Buying commercial paper could open the Fed to difficult conflicts of interest, because it would be juggling the goals of protecting its investment portfolio with its traditional goals of promoting stable prices and low unemployment.

"The Federal Reserve really would become the buyer of last resort, trying to jump-start the commercial paper market by taking on credit risk," said Vincent Reinhart, a former top Fed official who worked under Alan Greenspan, a former Fed chairman, and Ben S. Bernanke, the chairman now.

The Federal Reserve has already stretched its resources to the limit by providing hundreds of billions of dollars in short-term loans to banks, Wall Street firms and money market funds.

On Monday, the Fed announced that it would once again redouble one of its key emergency lending programs, increasing the size of its Term Auction Facility to $600 billion, from $300 billion. On top of that, the central bank plans to provide an additional $300 billion to banks to meet their end-of-the-year cash needs.

To pay for its burgeoning responsibilities, the Fed has no choice but to keep printing more money. To prevent that flood of new money from reducing the central bank's overnight interest rate to zero, the Fed also announced on Monday that it would start paying interest on the excess reserves that banks keep on deposit at the Fed.

Paying interest on reserves allows the central bank to set a floor on interest rates and retain at least some control over monetary policy.

In its announcement on Monday, the Fed said it would pay an interest rate of 1.25 percent —three-quarters of a point below its target of 2 percent for the overnight Federal funds rate.

But the possibility of propping up the vast market for commercial paper could represent an undertaking even broader than the Treasury Department's plan to buy as much as $700 billion in mortgage-backed securities.

In statements on Monday morning, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury said they were "consulting with market participants on ways to provide additional support for term unsecured funding markets."

By referring to "unsecured funding markets," policy makers signaled that they wanted to intervene directly in the credit markets. Officials said on Monday evening that they wanted to finish a plan as quickly as possible, perhaps as early as Tuesday.

But the effort is fraught with legal complexities. Though the Federal Reserve has sweeping power to create money and lend it out, experts said it was normally prohibited from buying assets that could lose money.

One way around that legal limitation would be to provide money to a separate legal entity that would do the buying and investing on the Fed's behalf. That would be similar to Maiden Lane Funding L.L.C., a special-purpose entity that officials created last spring to hold $29 billion in hard-to-sell securities from Bear Stearns.

But so far, the myriad efforts by government regulators to shore up confidence have seemed to yield little relief among investors, some of whom believed the actions have taken on a haphazard air.

"People are slowly but surely coming to the realization that playing 'Whack-a-Mole' with each of these issues as they arise, on an ad hoc basis, doesn't get the job done," said Max Bublitz, chief strategist at SCM Advisors, an investment firm in San Francisco.

On Wall Street, Monday was a frightening day for investors — the type of day where a 369-point deficit in the Dow is considered a relief.

A broad sell-off began at the opening bell and intensified throughout the morning. After 2 p.m., the Dow was down a hair over 800 points, worse than the 777-point drop one week earlier.

But around 2:30, investors began to hunt for bargains, sending the Dow briefly back above the 10,000 mark, before finishing the day at 9,955.50. The broader stock market closed down 3.9 percent, as measured by the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index. Shares of financial firms, manufacturing outfits and industrial companies all fell sharply. The Dow has lost 1,187 points, about 10.7 percent, and the S. & P. almost 13 percent in a week.

The sharp slide on Monday came despite assurances from President Bush that it would "take a while to restore confidence to the financial system."

"We don't want to rush into this situation and have the program not be effective."

Following are the results of Monday's Treasury auction of 72-day cash management bills and three-month and six-month bills.

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Prosecutors Expected To Spare Wall St. Firms
Category: News and Politics

Prosecutors Expected To Spare Wall St. Firms

Carrie Johnson | The Washington Post | October 3, 2008

Justice Department officials yesterday vowed to unravel the complex financial deals that helped prompt a market crisis in an effort that will generally seek criminal charges against individual brokers and bankers, rather than companies themselves, according to interviews with lawyers involved in the cases.

Mindful of the fallout from the last wave of business fraud cases six years ago, authorities are leaning against seeking indictments of major banks and insurers that may have inflated the value of their mortgage-related investments. Instead, prosecutors will look for such garden-variety crimes as false statements and insider trading by executives who tried to disguise financial problems or pad their wallets.

Exhibit A is Bear Stearns, the investment bank that collapsed in March and was bought by J.P. Morgan Chase during a cash squeeze that ultimately gripped Wall Street. Two former fund managers there are fighting criminal charges for allegedly misleading investors about the financial health of their unit. The company will avoid indictment, according to two sources familiar with the case who spoke on condition of anonymity because the process is not final. Robert Nardoza, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's office in the Eastern District of New York, declined to comment yesterday.

That pattern is likely to persist even as fallout from the liquidity crisis intensifies. Last week, the FBI announced 26 investigations underway at companies including Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers, American International Group, Countrywide Financial and IndyMac.

At an American Bar Association conference yesterday, Deputy Attorney General Mark R. Filip vowed that prosecutors would press ahead to decode the obscure financial products at the heart of the market's troubles. He said there would be "no unwillingness to take the facts and the law where they lead."

Yet the tenor is markedly different from the last wave of financial scandals, which began with the indictment of accounting firm Arthur Andersen six years ago. The firm swiftly collapsed, costing tens of thousands of jobs. More recently, corporate executives and civil liberties advocates pressed for legislation that would bar strong-arm prosecution tactics. In August, Filip issued guidance that reminds prosecutors to consider the rights of corporate employees.

Among other factors, the guidelines require government lawyers to take into account the health of a business when they make decisions about whether to file criminal charges. Given the current landscape, with Lehman in bankruptcy proceedings, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac under federal control, and AIG surviving only after an $85 billion infusion from the Treasury, lawyers with experience in such cases predict few major criminal prosecutions of businesses.

"It would be a very rare company that would ever be prosecuted," said Joshua Hochberg, former chief of the Justice Department's fraud section. "These are all negotiated settlements. . . . A criminal conviction brings mandatory debarment and effectively puts a corporation out of business."

Prosecutors for months have been sifting through documents in an effort to separate bad business decisions from possible criminal conduct.

The initiative has been complicated in part by gaps in regulation of mortgage-backed securities. Credit-default swaps, a kind of insurance against defaults on housing-related investments, are not considered a security under the laws that govern the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to Columbia University law professor John Coffee Jr. That means companies that sell the swaps do not have an affirmative duty to advise investors about their risks. Rather, brokers would be subject to law enforcement action only if they made a misleading statement about their risks or value, perhaps in a bid to win greater fees.

"It's always fraudulent when you have a material misrepresentation, deliberately made, with the intent to deceive and for personal gain," said Gil M. Soffer, who oversees corporate fraud prosecutions at the Justice Department.

Such allegations go to the heart of a criminal case filed last month against two former Credit Suisse employees and may underpin an investigation of individuals who had worked at Lehman and who were involved in the same market, known as auction-rate securities. The Lehman probe was reported yesterday by the Wall Street Journal.

Government officials with experience investigating corporate fraud say some of the patterns they are detecting -- lying to investors, shifting debt off corporate balance sheets -- are familiar.

"The more things change, the more things stay the same," said Benton Campbell, U.S. for the Eastern District of New York and a former member of the government's Enron Task Force.

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Open Document Format made national standard in Sweden
Category: News and Politics

Open Document Format made national standard in Sweden

Gijs Hillenius | OSOR | October 1, 2008

The Swedish Standards Institute (SIS) approved the Open Document Format (ODF) as a national standard, the ODF Alliance reported this week.

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Credit markets to Washington: Bailout isn’t enough
Category: News and Politics

Credit markets to Washington: Bailout isn't enough
Madlen Read | The Associated Press | October 3, 2008

After House OKs bailout, credit markets tighten on fears the plan isn't enough to help economy NEW YORK (AP) -- The credit markets finally got a bailout bill, but the stranglehold hasn't let up -- a troubling sign that lenders and investors believe the package will only be a baby step in the long road to economic recovery.

The credit markets, where companies go to get cash loans, have seized up since the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and in anticipation of the $700 billion plan initially voted down by the House. The House passed a revised version of it Friday following the Senate's approval earlier this week, but anxiety about its effectiveness kept demand for Treasury bills high and nearly nonexistent for other types of debt.

Overall, market participants have begun regarding the rescue plan as a medicine for what's ailing the financial system, but not a cure-all.

"At best, we can hope that it stems some of the more intense risk from the credit crisis. It prevents things from spiraling out of hand here," said JPMorgan Chase economist Michael Feroli.

Some are worried, though, that the plan will not work at all.

"Nobody knows how it's going to succeed," said Howard Simons, strategist with Bianco Research in Chicago. "It seems the American public had better sense than Wall Street and Washington -- the American public said, don't throw good money after bad."

The Treasury will buy banks' risky mortgage-backed assets in an effort to alleviate investors' worries about the institutions' solvency and free them up to do more lending. Even if those efforts succeed, the effects will be far from instantaneous, and borrowing could remain very expensive for some time. With the economy in such a weak state, lending to consumers and businesses will still appear risky until certain factors -- particularly employment and the housing market -- improve.

The Labor Department said employers cut payrolls by 159,000 in September, the largest loss in more than five years, while unemployment remained at 6.1 percent.

Layoffs are likely to keep piling up if it remains tough to find credit. Spectrum Yarns Inc., a North Carolina textile company, said it closed two plants and laid off 200 workers this week because it got turned down by a North Carolina bank, a New York finance company, and several private lenders.

It could also get even harder for certain individuals to get home loans. Banks have gotten more stringent in their mortgage underwriting, and Wisconsin's affordable-housing agency recently suspended making loans for single-family homes because it was unable to sell tax-exempt mortgage revenue bonds and raise capital.

It's not that financing has completely dried up. For example, Toyota Motor Corp. on Friday offered zero-percent financing on nearly a dozen models to lure customers, who've been having a harder and harder time finding car loans.

But many companies aren't in a position right now to be so aggressive -- particularly banks that have been losing billions of dollars on their mortage assets.

On Friday, the London Interbank Offered Rate, or LIBOR, for three-month dollar loans rose to 4.33 percent from 4.21 percent Thursday. That bank-to-bank lending rate has been rising all week, showing that banks are growing less and less willing to lend out their cash for longer than overnight.

LIBOR is tied to many consumer rates like adjustable-rate mortgages.

In one promising sign, overnight lending has gotten significantly cheaper -- LIBOR for overnight dollar loans plunged to a hair below 2 percent on Friday, the lowest rate in nearly four years, from 2.67 percent Thursday.

That overnight rate is now below the Fed's key bank-to-bank overnight lending rate, known as the target fed funds rate, of 2 percent. It appears that central banks' decision to ramp up their lending to financial institutions over the past couple weeks is having a positive effect.

But that's little solace to borrowers who need a loan for longer than overnight.

Over the past week, the amount of short-term corporate debt known as commercial paper on the market has plunged. And banks and investment firms have borrowed in record amounts from the Federal Reserve's emergency lending facility.

Money market mutual funds, usually the biggest buyers of commercial paper, have run for safety after a money market fund "broke the buck" two weeks ago due to its exposure to Lehman. When a fund breaks the buck, it does not have enough assets to cover every dollar invested in it. Instead of commercial paper, they've been investing in Treasury bills.

"There's really no theme except the theme of survival," said John Spinello, bond strategist at Jefferies & Co., referring to the constricted trading in the credit markets Friday.

The impact of the credit market seize-up has been widespread, affecting individuals, small businesses, large companies and municipalities.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said Friday California might to take out short-term loans from the federal government if the markets don't loosen up.

Also Friday, YRC Worldwide Inc., one of the nation's largest trucking companies, said it drew down $325 million on a credit line to repay some debt that matures this year and next.

After the House's vote Friday afternoon, the yield on the three-month Treasury bill slipped to 0.50 percent from 0.70 percent late Thursday. There has been no decrease in demand for T-bills, seen as the safest assets around, even though they are offering extremely low returns. The discount rate on the three-month was 0.47 percent.

There was little change in the strained credit default swap market, either, according to data from Phoenix Partners Group. Credit default swaps are essentially insurance policies against bond defaults; when rates are high, it means the market is betting on a higher probability that a company will fail to pay back its loan.

The stock market sank after the House passed the plan, sending investors back into longer-term Treasurys.

The 2-year note rose 1/32 to 100 26/32, with a yield of 1.58 percent, down from 1.62 percent late Thursday.

The 10-year note rose 7/32 to 103 10/32, and yielded 3.60 percent, down from 3.64 percent.

The 30-year bond rose 1 3/32 to 107, and yielded 4.09 percent, down from 4.16 percent.

AP Business Writer Emery P. Dalesio in Charlotte, N.C., AP Business Writer Dan Strumpf in New York, and Associated Press Writer Judy Lin in Sacramento contributed to this report.

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Cheney: Wildlife Conservation Has Been A ’High Priority’ Of Bush Administration
Category: News and Politics

Cheney: Wildlife Conservation Has Been A 'High Priority' Of Bush Administration
Amanda Terkel | Think Progress | October 4, 2008

Yesterday, Vice President Cheney spoke at the White House Conference on North American Wildlife Policy in Reno, NV, claiming that the Bush administration has championed wildlife preservation:

As all of you know very well, President Bush made wildlife conservation an early and a high priority of his administration. We've carried out that commitment in these eight years — and we've been proud to have people like you as partners in the enterprise.

The men and women in this room understand what conservation is all about. It means reverence toward creation, and a commitment to faithful stewardship. It means guarding our spectacular wildlife populations — not just for our own time, but for all time.

In fact, the League of Conservation Voters concludes that the Bush administration "has arguably been the most anti-environmental in our nation's history." Some highlights of officials putting special interests over wildlife:

– Rules proposed by the Bush administration would effectively gut the Endangered Species Act, no longer requiring federal agencies to consult with the Fish and Wildlife Service or the National Marine Fisheries Service to determine whether a project would harm an endangered species.

– Earlier this year, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff used his power to waive federal laws, including the Endangered Species Act, in order to expedite building the U.S.-Mexico border fence.

– In September, a federal judge dealt the Bush administration a setback by ruling that its plan "to allow more than 500 snowmobiles a day into Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks was not in keeping with the National Park Service's responsibility to protect the parks" and would disturb wildlife.

– Officials have repeatedly refused to acknowledge and protect wildlife threatened by global warming.

– In March 2007, Salon reported that the Bush administration had "granted 57 species endangered status, the action in each case being prompted by a lawsuit. That's fewer than in any other administration in history."

– In a 2005 survey, Fish and Wildlife scientists reported that they had been "forced to alter or withhold findings that would have led to greater protections for endangered species."

Bush had originally been scheduled to speak at the conference but sent Cheney instead at the last minute. "In my place I have sent my favorite hunter," Bush explained, alluding to Cheney's 2006 hunting accident.

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The dumbing down of the GOP
Category: News and Politics

The dumbing down of the GOP

Sarah Palin's debate performance should signal the beginning of the end of her fad. But for the moment it is worth looking at the meaning of her nomination, without the protective varnish of what conservatives usually dismiss as political correctness.

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The War on Intellectualism
Category: News and Politics

I have been absolutely dumbfounded as I have watched the level of discourse (and the ensuing media coverage) in this political season. There has always been a level of "east coast intellectual" bashing from the right, but this cycle it has been raised to a completely new level.

We have seen McCain release vapid attack ad after attack ad about "celebrity", all the while being devoid of any facts or issues. We have seen Palin stumble through interviews, to the point of not even being able to name any newspapers she reads (very reminiscent of George W. Bush, who famously said he doesn't read). The media even praised Palin in the debate for being "down to earth" and a "breath of fresh air."

How is dumbing down our country a breath of fresh air? Lowering the discourse to these levels (Paris Hilton, hockey moms, and lipstick — oh my!) has been staggering and disheartening to watch.

The war has not only been waged by promoting the "Joe Six-pack" quality (a term that makes my skin crawl and sounds incredibly offensive) of McCain and Palin, however. The GOP has taken to throwing around charges of elitism, arugula-eating, latte- and martini-drinking to show how Obama and Biden — and by extension all Democrats — are "out of touch" with "real" Americans. It's an amazing argument — by being too smart and thoughtful on issues, they just don't understand anything. Want proof? They eat fancy salad and drink coffee.

It is also constantly being said that both Obama and Biden are too "professorial", as if being an intelligent leader is a weakness. Professors are people who KNOW THINGS and can lead and teach others. How is that an insult? They simply know too much to be the leaders of the free world? All those pesky details floating around in their heads makes it impossible for them to lead? Huh?

How did we get here? I certainly don't want just any old Average Joe to lead our country. I want someone who knows facts and issues. And if they don't know something, I want someone with the intellectual curiosity to learn and find out! Pick up a newspaper, get online, and surround yourself with other intelligent people. Yet McCain can't use the internet and Palin can't name a paper she reads. Where is the intellectualism to be a true leader in this time of trouble in our country?

Let me be clear — I don't care if politicians don't seem "fun" or "folksy" — I don't want to have a beer with them. I want them to lead. "Going with your gut" is not a viable option for this level of leadership. Quick sound bites or catch phrases don't make you a good leader. I don't care if you can hunt, were in the PTA, or wink at me — I want you to be educated about the issues facing our country.

Intellectualism is a quality we want in a leader. I would rather have someone who might be a bit dry and heavy on the facts than someone who is folksy and dead wrong any day.

But hey, what do I know? Maybe I'll just stick to eating my elitist arugula salad and reading.

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VIDEO: Tina Fey As Sarah Palin In VP Debate On SNL
Category: News and Politics

VIDEO: Tina Fey As Sarah Palin In VP Debate On SNL
NBC via The Huffington Post | October 4, 2008

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